Wind turbines have become an important source of electrical power worldwide. Generally, wind turbines are supported by a tower and driven by multiple wind turbine blades, each of which is typically tens of meters in length. As efforts are made to increase the amount of electrical power generated per wind turbine, the length of the wind turbine blades has also correspondingly increased.
The significant length of currently available wind turbine blades, as well as the continuing efforts to design and manufacture even longer wind turbine blades, has presented substantial challenges for those tasked with transporting wind turbine blades from the manufacturer to the wind turbine farms. One particular challenging scenario is the transportation by ship.
Currently, the blade manufacturer typically bolts fixtures to the blade root and tip sections, which provide points for the blades to be lifted and moved without damage, as well as for securing the blades to ship decks and other transportation vehicles. Although these fixtures are usually designed and fabricated for reuse, in actual practice their components, including the bolts, are often lost or discarded at the wind turbine farms, which can result in a significant, and often avoidable, monetary loss to the wind turbine blade manufacturer.
The lifting of wind turbine blades on and off of ships, as well the process of securing the wind turbine blades to the ship decks, present a number of other problems. Among other things, in-port time and cost constraints require techniques for quickly and safely lifting the blades on and off of the ship, as well as for efficiently and effectively securing the blades to the ship decks for safe transit overseas.
Another factor is maximizing the number of wind turbine blades that can be carried per shipload. For example, in some circumstances, the blades are stacked in an edge-horizontal orientation to increase packing density; however, depending on the size of the ship, the loading applied during transport at sea can cause the horizontally-oriented bodies of the stacked blades to flex vertically, which can result in undue stress, contact between vertically adjacent blades, and blade damage.